The Winemaker (15 page)

“Come on!” Guillem said; he grunted with effort as he ran, and Josep followed. Each freight car seemed to have a padlock on the door as they ran past.

“Here’s one,” Josep said at last. The door protested when they pulled it open. In a moment they were inside, and the door screeched again as they shoved it closed.

“Everyone must have heard that,” Guillem muttered. They stood in silent desperation in the perfect dark, waiting for guards with clubs.

Nobody came.

In a moment there was a hard jerk as the car moved and stopped. Then it moved again, and this time it kept on moving.

The freight car strongly disclosed the nature of its last cargo.

“Onions,” Josep said, and Guillem laughed.

Josep moved cautiously around the car’s perimeter, holding onto the swaying walls, making certain they shared the darkness with nobody else. But the car was empty of other people as well as of onions, and he felt a great sense of relief when he was back at Guillem’s side.

At midday they had eaten free bowls of lentil soup in a restaurant kitchen where they had left hams, so Josep still clutched the sack of food Gerardo had given them. In a little while they sat and ate, beginning with the sausages and the hardened bread. The tortillas had broken apart, but they savored every crumb; then they lay back on the vibrating floor.

Josep farted.

“…Well…not as bad as Xavier Miró’s,” Guillem said judiciously.

“Nothing is as bad as Xavier’s.”

Guillem’s laughter was strained.

“I wonder where he is.”

“I wonder where all the others are,” Josep said.

They were worried that guards might inspect the train in Guadalajara, but when they reached there just before midnight, no one bothered the car door during the few long minutes the train sat at the station. Eventually the train jolted forward again and moved on, rattling and swaying, the noise and motion making a strange rhythmic music that at first kept Josep awake and finally lulled him into sleep.

He awoke to the squealing of the door being moved back by Guillem, daylight diluting the dark. The train was clacking along at good speed, through open farm country. Guillem pissed through the door, no people or animals in sight except for a large bird hanging in the sky.

Josep felt rested but very thirsty, and hungry again; he regretted not saving some of Gerardo’s food. He and Guillem sat and watched farms, fields, forests, villages appear and disappear. A long nervous stop in Zaragoza, then Caspe…smaller pueblos, open fields, crops, sandy wastes…

He whistled. “Big country, no?” he said, and Guillem nodded.

Bored, he slept again for three or four hours. It was afternoon when Guillem shook his shoulder and woke him.

“I just saw a sign, five leagues to Barcelona.”

Gerardo had warned them that most likely in Barcelona there would be guards checking all the freight cars.

They waited until the train was in a slow, labored climb up a long incline and jumped from the open door with little difficulty. They stood and watched the train move away, and then they began to walk along the tracks in the direction the train had gone. Half an hour later they came to a sandy road that began to run parallel to the rails, easier walking.

The sign on a neglected olive tree said
La Cruilla, 1 league
.

A hot sun made the weather mild, and soon they unbuttoned their heavy jackets and then took them off and carried them. La Cruilla turned out to be a village, a cluster of whitewashed houses and a few shops that had sprung up where another dirt lane crossed the tracks and the road they had been following. There was a café, and they were very hungry. When they sat at a table, Josep ordered three eggs, tomato bread, and coffee.

The woman who served them asked if they would like ham, and he and Guillem both grinned but didn’t order any.

Josep spotted a newspaper at a nearby table and went to it at once. It was
El Cascabel
. He began to read it on the way back to their table, walking very slowly, stopping in his tracks twice. “Ah…Ah…”

“What is it?” Guillem said.

The story was on the first page of the paper. It had a black border around it.

“He died,” Josep said.

21

Sharing

Josep read every word of the news story aloud to Guillem in a low voice hoarse with tension.

The newspaper said that President Prim had been one of the men responsible for the overthrow of Queen Isabella, the reinstatement of a monarchy, and the election by the Cortes of a member of the Italian royalty—Amadeus, Prince of Savoy and Duke of Aosta—as the new king of Spain.

Amadeus I had arrived in Madrid to assume his throne only hours after the death of General Prim, his principal supporter. On the new monarch’s orders, General Prim’s body was to lie in state for four days of public mourning, and in the presence of the corpse Amadeus had taken an oath to obey the constitution of Spain.

“The Guardia Civil is said to be close to making arrests of several persons thought to have been participants in the assassination,” Josep read.

Guillem groaned.

They ate their food without tasting it and then wandered off without destination, two people in a shared bad dream.

“I think we should go to the Guardia, Guillem.”

Guillem shook his head grimly. “They will not believe that we were merely dupes. If they have not captured Peña or the others, they will be happy to blame the murder on us.”

They walked in silence.

“Perhaps they were Carlists. Who knows? We were chosen because they wanted stupid country boys to fashion into killers,” Josep said. “Desperate, unemployed peons who could be trained to do whatever they ordered.”

Guillem nodded. “Peña selected us to be his marksmen, you and I. But then they decided we weren’t to be trusted. So other persons were found to fire at that poor bastard and kill him, while we were deemed just smart enough to hold a horse and light a match,” he said bitterly.

“We can’t return to the village,” he said. “Peña’s people—the Carlists or whatever they are—may be looking for us. The police may be searching for us! The army, the militia!”

“Then what shall we do? Where can we go?” Josep said.

“I don’t know. We had best think,” Guillem told him.

By the time dusk approached, they were still trudging aimlessly along the road next to the train tracks, in the general direction of Barcelona. “We must find a place to spend the night,” Josep said.

Fortunately the weather was mild, but it was winter in northern Spain, which meant that the air could become raw and chill without notice. “The important thing is to be protected in case the wind starts to blow,” Guillem said. Presently they came upon a large stone-lined culvert that ran under the road, and they agreed it was a suitable site.

“We’ll be fine unless there is a downpour, in which case we’ll drown,” Josep said, for the conduit was designed to funnel the waters of a stream beneath the road and the
tracks, but years of drought had caused the stream to vanish. Inside the big pipe, the air was still and warm and there was an accumulation of soft, clean sand.

It took only a few minutes to collect a pile of driftwood from the riverbed. In Josep’s pocket he still had several matches from the handful Peña had given him, and very quickly they had a small, brisk fire making satisfactory snapping noises and shedding warmth and light.

“I am going to go south, I think. Perhaps Valencia or Gibralter. Maybe even, Africa,” Guillem said.

“All right. We’ll go south.”

“…No, I’d best go south alone, Josep. Peña is aware we are close friends. He, and the police, will be looking for two men traveling together. One man can blend into any background more easily, therefore it will be safer for each of us to travel alone. And they’ll be searching for us close to home, so we must go far away from Catalonia. If I go south, you should go north.”

It sounded like good sense. “But I don’t believe we should split up,” Josep said doggedly. “When two friends travel together, if one of them runs into trouble, the other is there to help.”

They regarded one another.

Guillem yawned. “Well, let’s sleep on it. We can talk some more in the morning,” he said.

They lay on either side of the fire. Guillem soon was asleep and snoring loudly, while Josep lay awake, from time to time placing another piece of wood on the fire.
Their pile of branches had almost disappeared by the time he finally drifted into sleep, and soon the blaze had become a small circle of ashes with a glowing heart.

The fire was cold and grey when he awoke, and so was the air.

“Guillem?” he said.

He was alone.

Guillem was off somewhere taking a piss, he thought, and allowed himself to drift back into sleep.

When he awoke again, the air was warmer. Sunshine streamed into the end of the culvert.

He was still alone.

“Hey,” he called. He clambered to his feet.

“Guillem?” he called.

“GUILLEM?”

He went outside the culvert and clambered up onto the road, but he could see no living creature in either direction.

He called out to Guillem several more times, feeling dismay growing within him.

Spurred by a sudden thought, he reached into his jacket pocket and experienced relief when he felt the roll of bank notes that had been given to him by his father and Nivaldo.

But…it felt different.

When he took it from his jacket and counted the bills, he saw that seven pesetas—half his money—was gone. Stolen from his pocket!

By his
friend
.

Nearly faint with rage, he lifted his fist and shook it at the heavens.

“SHAME! BASTARD! ROTTEN BASTARD!”

“FU-UCK YOU, GUILLEM!” he screamed.

22

Alone

He returned to the culvert for no reason, like an animal crawling back into its den, and sat in the sand next to the ashes of the dead fire.

He had depended heavily on Guillem. Guillem hadn’t known how to read or write, but after Nivaldo, Guillem Parera was the smartest person Josep knew. Josep remembered how Guillem had stopped him from stupidly wandering back to Sergeant Peña at the Madrid railroad yard, and how Guillem had known immediately that the scullery sink at the Metropolitano Café would be a safe haven for them. Josep didn’t feel smart, and he didn’t know if he could survive alone.

As he transferred the thin roll of pesetas from his pocket to his sock, he thought about the fact that Guillem could easily have stolen all his money instead of half, and it dawned on him that Guillem had made a contest of their troubles.

It was as if Guillem spoke to him.

We start off from here equal in money. See which of us can do better.

It made him angry again and overrode his fear, so that he was able to abandon the temporary safety of the culvert. Blinking against the warm sunlight, he scrambled back up to the road and began to walk.

In less than a league he came to a place where the train tracks heading east into Barcelona were crossed by tracks going north and south. Though it bothered him to admit it even to himself, Guillem had been right about several things in their
disagreement of the previous evening. He could not go back to Santa Eulália. It would be dangerous for him to go to Barcelona, dangerous even to remain in Catalonia.

He turned left and followed the new tracks north.

He felt justified in taking Guillem’s advice now; after all, he told himself, he had paid for it.

He didn’t know where trains would stop or where they could safely be boarded, but when he came to a long, steep hill, he climbed the incline until he was near the top, then he lay down beneath a tree and waited.

Less than an hour later he heard the faint rumbling and clacking, the distant animal howl of the whistle, and he waited with rising hope and expectation. The train’s motion became ever slower as it climbed the hill, just as he had hoped. By the time it reached him he could have boarded easily, but the train was made up entirely of passenger cars and thus was of no use to him.